Paul Kingsnorth

Invigorating … No one can read this refreshingly subversive book and emerge with their world-view intact

A trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology's promise of power and autonomy

Truly Allen Ginsberg updated for the internet age – and rightly so, for Ginsberg was a howling prophet

Kingsnorth is a gifted stylist and a syncretic thinker... his insights are sharp and layered. He is an astute critic of the fashionable nonsense that passes for contemporary politics

There’s lots of food for thought here about alienation, rootedness, the self, the past, religion and science... One that wriggles around in your brain a while

The most powerful and important book I have read in years. This book should be required reading not only for politicians, technocrats, teachers and all who help shape our world, but for every still-living soul in this terrifying age of the Machine

Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary

Something in our common life has long seemed bewildering, even ominous, and Paul Kingsnorth makes it finally clear what we're up against. The gears clanking around us are not working at random, but with increasingly inhuman intent. Now I see what I must do. Now I understand

Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of Facing East

Against the Machine is an eloquent and erudite critique of the perils of modern technology. But it’s much more than that. It’s a searching, moving meditation on the fate of humanity in a world where money and mechanism have displaced meaning

Nicholas Carr, author of Superbloom and The Shallows

Thank God for Paul Kingsnorth! Serious, furious, and always consistent, this is a Christian thinker who does not sugarcoat his convictions

Justin Smith-Riui, author of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

Kingsnorth has done something extraordinary: he has captured the spiritual crisis of our time in language so compelling I could not put the book down. The vision he paints is a bleak one: a post-human, machinic future. But as long as our world still has space for voices this vivid, I dare hope we have not yet succumbed to the Machine

Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress

On the Unmaking of Humanity

In Against the Machine, “furiously gifted” (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original—and terrifying—account of the technological-cultural matrix enveloping all of us. With insight into the spiritual and economic roots of techno-capitalism, Kingsnorth reveals how the Machine, in the name of progress, has choked Western civilization, is destroying the Earth itself, and is reshaping us in its image. From the First Industrial Revolution to the rise of artificial intelligence, he shows how the hollowing out of humanity has been a long game—and how your very soul is at stake. 
 
It takes effort to remain truly human in the age of the Machine. Here Kingsnorth reminds us what humanity requires: a healthy suspicion of entrenched power; connection to land, nature and heritage; and a deep attention to matters of the spirit. Prophetic and poetic, Against the Machine is a spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.

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Paul Kingsnorth

Praise for Against the Machine

Invigorating … No one can read this refreshingly subversive book and emerge with their world-view intact

A trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology's promise of power and autonomy

Truly Allen Ginsberg updated for the internet age – and rightly so, for Ginsberg was a howling prophet

Invigorating … No one can read this refreshingly subversive book and emerge with their world-view intact

A trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology's promise of power and autonomy

Truly Allen Ginsberg updated for the internet age – and rightly so, for Ginsberg was a howling prophet

Invigorating … No one can read this refreshingly subversive book and emerge with their world-view intact

A trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology's promise of power and autonomy

Truly Allen Ginsberg updated for the internet age – and rightly so, for Ginsberg was a howling prophet

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